Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

IMG MGMT: Life As A Woman, Hedy Lamarr

[Editors Note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today's invited artist, Michaela Melián, lives and works in Upper Bavaria. This fall her work will be exhibited in the show "See This Sound" at Lentos Museum Linz, "The Dwelling" at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and "Different Places - Different Stories," a series of interventions in public spaces along the German/Dutch borderline. She is intensively working on the realization of &qu

Mamet, Disney to Produce Anne Frank

This is a bit hard to wrap your head around: David Mamet and Disney are teaming up to produce a new film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Disney has acquired the rights, and Mamet is set to write and produce, according to Variety. “Mamet will use the famed diary, and the original play by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, to tell the story of the young Jewish girl who hid with her family from the Nazis in the an attic in Amsterdam,” Variety reports. “Mamet brings his own original take on th

Hollywood's Jewish Avenger

...I found myself sitting beside Quentin Tarantino’s pool in the Hollywood Hills, listening in wonder as the writer and director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction diagnosed what he saw as the essential, maddening flaw of every Holocaust movie ever made. “Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not

The Fab Four come home to Hamburg

The site of Hamburg's legendary Star Club where The Beatles shot to fame is today occupied by a Chinese takeaway that reeks of fried noodles, but around midnight the place can still rock to the sound of "Twist and Shout" – even if it is played on a ukulele. The twangy music and German-accented lyrics and are down to the Hamburg busker Stefanie Hempel, a self-confessed Fab Four fanatic who has begun taking tourists on a warts-and-all Beatles tour of the city's red light dis

Classic and Contemporary Masterpieces on Show at the National Museum of Singapore

The National Museum of Singapore presents A Story of the Image: Old & New Masters From Antwerp, showcasing an exclusive collection of 150 artworks from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp (KMSKA), the Museum Plantin-Moretus/Print room and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA). The exhibition runs from 14 August to 4 October 2009. In the exhibition, historical and contemporary artworks are juxtaposed to examine the subversion of the purpose and intent of the original image

A Series of Exhibitions in Italy will Celebrate Elio Ciol's 80th Anniversary

A series of exhibitions organized at Villa Manin di Passariano, in Casarsa della Delizia and in Pordenone celebrates the eighty years of Elio Ciol, one of the Italian landscape photographers better known in the world, and sixty years of professional work of the artist. Elio Ciol is known mainly for his photographic interpretations of Italian landscape and for his work of documentation of artistic heritage. The Villa Manin exhibition deals with a lesser known period of the photographer, that of t

Celebrate Woodstock's 40th Anniversary Visiting the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a $100 million outdoor performing arts center and museum located approximately 90 minutes from New York City at the site of the original 1969 Woodstock festival in Bethel, NY. The 15,000 seat outdoor performing arts venue and The Museum at Bethel Woods are set within nearly 2,000 bucolic acres. The Pavilion Stage covers 4,500 seats with another 10,500 on a natural sloping lawn while offering unique backdrops including the original festival site and the majesty

Scopes film wins merit award

A documentary about the Scopes Trial, filmed by staff members of a New Hampshire high school with the help of Bryan College and historian Edward Larson, has received an Award of Merit and a WOW Award from the American Association for State and Local History. Staff members from Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, N.H., traveled to Dayton, Tenn., in February 2008 to film interviews about the Scopes Trial and take images for their documentary. The project, titled "Theatre

Archives of American Art's New Exhibition Portrays "Hard Times, 1929 - 1939"

The crash of the stock market in 1929 initiated a chain of events that crippled the American art scene. As money from private patrons and museums evaporated, artists joined the nation’s staggering number of unemployed workers. The toils and triumphs of a wide range of individual artists and art organizations—documented in letters, photographs, journals, business records and oral-history interviews at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art—reveal how American artists survived against the odds

New York Academy of Art Announces a Special Exhibition "Leipzig Calling: Twenty Years after the Iron Curtain"

The New York Academy of Art announced a special exhibition, “Leipzig Calling: Twenty Years after the Iron Curtain,” opening on September 17th, from 6-8pm, and remaining on view through October 18th. On display are recent works by a number of eminent and emerging contemporary artists who have chosen to live and work in Leipzig and to respond in their art to this German city known historically as a center for learning and culture. Curated by Anna-Louise Kratzsch, critic and director

A new HBO documentary oversimplifies the many lives of Marion Barry.

... Politics and Washington in the 1980s will forever be associated with Ronald Reagan. But if you lived in DC during that decade (and didn't work for the White House), Barry was the more totemic political figure. He was responsible for whether your trash got picked up, your street got plowed, or your kindergarten teacher showed up at school each day. But it was the fact that, as often as not, these things did not happen that made him seem even more powerful. Barry's tenure as mayor was a great

Doomsday nuclear scenarios ... Hollywood's take

A specter is haunting the United States: the specter of nuclear attack without nuclear war. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Iran, Pakistan and North Korea, capable state and shadowy non-state actors contemplate flattening an American city with a device smuggled into the United States at one hundred possible ports of entry. It would have no return address. The scenarios of holocaust are many and multiply with the advance of technology and the Information Age. What will this lead to? 1

Alice in Wonderland gets 'sexy' TV makeover

The four-hour live action adventure, based on the 1865 Lewis Carroll story, will star Tim Curry and Kathy Bates. Bradford-born actor Andrew-Lee Potts is also cast together with relative newcomer Caterina Scorsone, who will play Alice. It comes as a new Alice in Wonderland film from Tim Burton which stars Johnny Depp, who will play the Mad Hatter, is due to be released in March 2010. In Willing's version, the main character Alice Hamilton is an independen

Rembrandt original comes out of hiding in Antwerp after restoration

Layers of discoloured varnish were cleaned off a portrait thought to be by a pupil of Rembrandt to reveal the signature of the great master himself (David Charter writes). Portrait of Pastor Swalmius has been verified as a Rembrandt after samples of its canvas were found to match the material used for two other masterpieces by the 17th-century Dutch painter. Curators of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp were overjoyed at the discovery — not because the painting’s

Matt Damon's 'History' is made (finally)

In the movie “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon’s character sees a book on a shelf. It is “A People’s History of the United States” by radical historian Howard Zinn. “This,” Damon tells his shrink, “will knock you on your ass.” That line turned out to be one part product placement, one part prophecy. Damon grew up next to Zinn, who taught at Boston University, and the young actor-to-be read “People’s History” when it was published in 1980. “It had

Johnp Perazzo: Obama Joker vs. Bush Joker

Caricatured portraits of Barack Obama wearing Heath Ledger-style"Joker" makeup, with the caption "socialism" situated just beneath the President's image, have been displayed recently on numerous outdoor surfaces — telephone poles, blank walls, highway supports, etc. – in the city of Los Angeles. obama j

Egypt anger over Sadat film dog

A character in I Love You Man says he named his dog Anwar Sadat because he looks "exactly" like the former leader. The lawyer, Samir Sabri, has demanded an inquiry into the showing of the film and asked the US embassy for an apology, Masrawy website reports. Several Egyptian bloggers say the film is an insult to their country. The character, played by Jason Segel, says his dog is a cross between a beagle and a pug and is "the most beautifu

New Tennyson museum marks the bicentenary of the poet's birth

Although Disraeli, Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Queen of Hawaii have been unable to accept the invitation to Lord Alfred Tennyson's birthday party today, his library on the Isle of Wight will again be full of distinguished guests talking of literature, science and art. A private passion for Victorian art has given rise to a new museum at Farringford House, Tennyson's home of 40 years, opening today to mark the bicentenary of the birth of a giant of the Victorian

A new boxed set of documentaries confirms that Hitler believed in safety in numbers

It seems that everyone had a plot to kill Hitler, not just the patriotic aristocrat Claus von Stauffenberg, portrayed by Tom Cruise in Valkyrie. Even Grandpa Simpson in the August issue of Simpsons comics (No 161) takes Hitler on as a young infantryman in the Second World War. Disguising himself as cheese and getting himself served at dinner at Hitler’s Berlin residence, where he has a clear shot not only at Hitler, but at Mussolini, Prime Minister Tojo of Japan and Flash Gordon’s enemy Ming the

Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs: When David Fought Goliath in Washington Square Park

Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs are the subject and the author of two of the most indelible nonfiction books of the 20th century: Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974) and Jacobs’s own “Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961). If you want to know about these towering oppositional figures, those are the bedrock texts, and neither feels remotely like homework: they’re as alive today as when they were written. It’s not immediately clear, in other words, why a